Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

“And pass the word to your people, and make sure they read you, and read you good.”

“Yes, Sir.”

And Archie had passed the word, and gotten dirty looks.

And now there was a Mercedes staff car down there, and it wasn’t like being in a dogfight, it was like running over a dog with your car; but you had to do it because you had told your people they had to do it, and Archie believed that an officer should not order anybody to do what he wouldn’t do himself.

Archie banked his Mustang steep to the right, lined up on the cloud of dust boiling out under the wheels of the Mercedes, and when he thought he had him, closed his finger on the trigger on the joystick. When he saw his tracer stream converge on the Mercedes and he didn’t have to correct, he thought he was getting pretty good at this shit.

The Mercedes ran off the road, turned over, and burst into flames. Maybe a couple of bodies had flown out of the Mercedes, but Archie couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t go back for a second look, because if he did and saw somebody running, he wasn’t going to try to get him.

He leveled off at about 500 feet and started looking for something else to interdict.

And at 2105 hours that night, at Afrika Korps General Hospital #3, near Carthage, Tunisia, the chief surgeon and hospital commander, Oberst-Arzt (Colonel-Doctor) Horst Friederich von and zu Mittlingen, pushed his way through the tent flap of the tent euphemistically called “Operating Theater Three” and reached beneath his bloodstained surgical apron for a package of cigarettes.

The hospital’s name implied something far more substantial than the reality. General Hospital #3 (which served the Tenth Panzer Division) was a sprawling collecting of tents and crude sheds, most of them marked with red crosses to protect against bombing or strafing. The tents served as operating theaters, the sheds as wards. Both were covered with the dust raised by the trucks and ambulances—and sometimes horse-drawn wagons—bringing in the wounded and dying.

Von und zu Mittlingen was a fifty-two-year-old Hessian trained at Marburg and Tübingen. Before the war, he had been professor of orthopedic surgery at St. Louise’s Hospital in Munich.

The cigarettes were Chesterfields. One of the nurses, who didn’t smoke but knew the Herr Oberst-Artz did, had taken them from the body of an American pilot who had survived the crash of his fighter plane but had died en route to Afrika Korps General Hospital #3. The lighter, too, was American, a Zippo, found on the floor of one of the surgical tents. There had been no telling how long it had been there, or to whom it had belonged, so he kept it.

He lit a Chesterfield, inhaled deeply, and felt with his hand behind him for one of the vertical poles holding up the corner of the tent. When he found it, he leaned against it, then exhaled, examining the glow of the cigarette as he did.

His hands were shaking. He willed them to be still.

It had been time to take a break, to leave the operating theater and step outside into the welcome cold of the night. And to light up a cigarette. And get a cup of coffee, if he could find one.

Though patients were still awaiting his attention, he had learned that he could push himself only so far. After so many hours at the table, his eyes did not see well, his fingers lost their skill, and his judgment was clouded by fatigue.

What he desperately wanted was a drink. But that would have to w

ait until later, much later, until there were no more wounded requiring his services. He would probably have to wait until the early morning for that. Then he would take several deep pulls from the neck of his bottle of brandy before falling into bed.

He took two more puffs on the Chesterfield, exhaled, and pushed himself away from the tent pole.

I will go to the mess and see if there is coffee. I will do nothing for the next ten minutes except smoke my cigarette and drink my coffee and take a piss.

His route took him past three tents on the perimeter of the hospital area. A medical team—a physician, a nurse, and stretcher bearers—stood outside the three tents as the ambulances and trucks brought the wounded to the hospital.

The physician categorized each incoming patient: Those who would most likely die if they did not go under the knife immediately, he ordered to be carried into the first tent, where a team of nurses would prepare them for surgery. As soon as a table was free, they underwent the knife. Those who had a reasonable chance of survival, but could wait a bit for surgery, were given morphine and moved into the second tent. As soon as the really critical patients had received attention, their turn in an operating theater would come. Those who stood little chance of survival were moved into the third tent and given morphine. When everyone in Tent A and Tent B had received treatment, an attempt would be made to save those in Tent C.

Oberst-Artz von und zu Mittlingen violated his own rule about never going into Tent C. The sight of dead men, and men in the last—too often agonized—moments of their lives, upset him. He knew it was better to be calm and emotionless when he was at the table.

There were six men on stretchers in Tent C.

The first two were dead. One looked asleep. The second’s face was frozen with his last agony.

Von und zu Mittlingen covered their faces with blankets and went to the last man on that side of the tent.

He was surprised that he was still alive.

His entire head was wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. That implied, at the least, serious trauma to his eyes and probably to his brain. Both of his hands were similarly bandaged, suggesting to von und zu Mittlingen that he would probably lose the use of both hands, and might actually lose the hands themselves.

Another heavily blood-soaked bandage was on his upper right leg, and his torso was also bandaged; but the amount of blood of these last suggested to von und zu Mittlingen that the wounds on his torso were not as serious as the others, though internal bleeding of vital organs was of course possible.

It would probably be better if the poor bastard died; the alternative is living as a blind cripple.

He noticed that the patient was wearing U.S. Army trousers but an Afrika Korps tunic. That quickly identified him as an officer, someone in a position to ignore the rules forbidding the wearing of any part of the enemy’s uniform.